● 11.23.16

● Links 23/11/2016: Fedora 25 Officially Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:19 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Do a web search for “Linux radio station”, and the pickings are slim indeed, with most sites promoting instead ham radio software or streaming audio players, and a handful devoted to setting up a streaming web radio station—including one such optimistic article in Linux Journal some 15 years ago (see “Running a Net Radio Station with Open-Source Software”, January 2001).

• Unfortunately, much of this documented interest took place a decade or more in the past via domains like opensourceradio.com that are no longer with us. A few projects persevere, but a good number of postings are similarly dated. The fact is, there are more Linux-based ways to stream and listen to radio stations than there actually are the means to broadcast and control them.

• Thanksgiving is in a few days, and talking about “things I am thankful for” is pretty traditional this time of year.

• So, here we go. Here’s my list of Linux-y (and free software-y) things I am thankful for in 2016. (At least the ones I could remember when I sat down to write this list.)

Desktop

• Laptops preloaded with Linux aren’t as rare as they used to be. In fact, big name hardware companies like Dell have whole lines of laptops that ship with Ubuntu installed, and if you want to stretch things a bit you could argue that a Chromebook is a kind of Linux machine (though it takes a bit of tinkering to get actual Linux installed). Still, there’s no question the Linux user of today has a wealth of options compared with the dark ages of just a few years ago when “I use Linux” was code for “I spend all my time looking for hardware drivers.”

Server

• What does developer advocate Burr Sutter have to do with “DevOps king” Gene Kim and his book, The Phoenix Project?

• As Sutter explained in his five-minute lightning talk at All Things Open 2016, they share a passion for hands-on technologists—the developers that craft awesome code and the operators who spin out the infrastructure to run it.

• Could it be that GNU/Linux and Apache/NGINX etc. are less expensive and more reliable??? Yes.

• Outweighing the existing major vendors, LiteSpeed demonstrated the largest hostname growth after it gained more than 40 million sites – a remarkable 740% increase. LiteSpeed’s growth included 38 million existing sites that were hosted by OVH, and previously using Taobao’s Tengine web server, which consequently suffered the largest loss of sites this month. The sites involved in this movement—nearly all of which make use of the .science TLD—are now hosted by Amazon Web Services. As a result of these changes, LiteSpeed’s market share of sites has leapt from 0.39% to 3.29%, taking it from 10th to 4th place – while Tengine has been displaced to 5th.

• [...]

• Using the less-volatile web-facing computers metric, Apache showed the largest growth this month with an increase of 39,900 computers, while nginx was not too far behind with net growth of 32,881. Despite LiteSpeed’s large hostname growth, it gained only a modest sum of 312 computers (+3.4%), making it the 7th largest vendor by this metric.

• Interest in open source network operating systems based on Linux running on a bare-metal switch is high. But not many networking professionals are familiar with platforms based on Linux. To make it simpler to make the switch, Cumulus Networks has created a Network Command Line Utility (NCLU) that provides a central location from which they can manually manage the Cumulus Linux environment using a command-line interface most network administrators would easily recognize.

• Cumulus Networks CTO JR Rivers says the goal is to provide network managers with a means of making the switch to an open source networking environment using a tool that resembles the ones most of them currently use to manage proprietary networks.

Kernel Space

• During the keynote, technical engineer Ildiko Vancsa made a cell phone call to OPNFV Director Heather Kirksey, using a set of 5G equipment on stage, running OPNFV (An open source implementation of NFV) on top of OpenStack. The call remained intact even though OpenStack Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier, also on-stage, started randomly cutting cables to the 5G gear, “Chaos Monkey” style.

Graphics Stack

• David Airlie has pulled the newest DRM/KMS driver into DRM-Next for merging in the Linux 4.10 kernel.

• This new driver is the Hisilicon Hibmc driver. As explained earlier this year when the patches first appeared, This new Hisilicon DRM driver is for supporting the Hibmc baseboard management controller and these initial patches just provide basic display subsystem support for their display engine and VDAC (Video Digital-to-Analog Converter).

• It’s been a busy week for Intel’s open-source developers working on their Vulkan “ANV” Linux driver with a number of the recent patch series having been merged a short time ago into mainline Mesa Git.

• As a quick update to More Intel ANV Vulkan Code Hits Mesa Git, Other Patches Pending and Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Now Has Patches For Fast Clears, that work is now in mainline Mesa.

• After a number of commits landed in mainline Mesa Git in the early hours of this morning, cull and clip distance support has been enabled for the open-source Intel Vulkan “ANV” Linux driver.

• After work on NIR and ANV, clip and cull distance support was enabled. Following that ANV driver work was also an i965 driver change to use the NIR-based clip/cull lowering for their OpenGL driver too to benefit from using the same code-path for both drivers.

• While many in our forums and other Linux communities want to see “AMDGPU-PRO die” or for AMD to stop supporting the hybrid/proprietary driver given the pace of RadeonSI development for OpenGL and the emerging RADV for (unofficial) Vulkan support, OpenCL remains one of AMDGPU-PRO’s strongholds. AMD has been working on opening up their proprietary compute stack, but for now it’s there. Here are some fresh AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 benchmarks versus NVIDIA in LuxMark, one of the real-world OpenCL workloads where the AMD blob does very well.

• David Airlie’s latest hacking on the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver code has led to basic PRIME support for this unofficial driver.

Applications

• While not to everyone’s tastes, such tools are often a lot quicker and surfacing what you need when you need it, rather than you having to point and click you way through apps like i-Nex or CPU-g.

• That garble is why I was stoked to find a link to Neofetch in my tips inbox recently (our recent call for content has done wonders). Neofetch is now my favourite CLI system information tool.

• We’re getting closer and closer to the final release of the LibreOffice 5.3 open-source and cross-platform office suite, and now The Document Foundation, through Italo Vignoli, informs us about the next bug hunting session, for the LibreOffice 5.3 Beta.

• Oracle announced the release of yet another stable maintenance update to the VirtualBox 5.1 series of the popular, cross-platform, and open-source virtualization software.

• VirtualBox 5.1.10 is here exactly two months after the previous point release, namely VirtualBox 5.1.8, and we have some good news for Linux users, as Oracle added initial support for the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel, which will be released in the second week of December 2016. It also fixes the Linux kernel module override rule in Linux Additions.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Fantastic news for strategy fans, as Cossacks 3 [Steam, Official Site] will be on Linux soon. A little later than planned, but we’ve been told the finishing touches are being done.

• This is one time I haven’t been too bothered by the delay, even though I wanted to play it badly. The game at release was quite buggy, but they have rolled out patch after patch to fix it up.

• The reviews overall are “Mostly Positive”, so I am still looking forward to it.

• A new maintenance update has arrived for users of the cross-platform and commercial Vendetta Online massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), versioned 1.8.397.

• A few moments ago, Feral Interactive officially announced the release of the Total War: WARHAMMER addictive turn-based strategy video game for Linux and SteamOS operating systems.

• Developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega, Total War: WARHAMMER launched on Valve’s Steam digital gaming distribution platform earlier this summer, on the 24th of May 2016, but only those with a Microsoft Windows PC were able to install and play it.

• Total War: WARHAMMER [Steam, Feral Store] is the latest big Linux port from Feral Interactive. As someone who has only recently become a fan of Warhammer, it was fun to see this game arrive on Linux.

• Note: My copy was provided by Feral Interactive.

• Right on schedule, Feral Interactive has released Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux.

• Shortly after Total War: WARHAMMER was released for Linux by Feral Interactive we had out NVIDIA Linux WARHAMMER benchmarks. Now having more time since that OpenGL Linux game port release on Tuesday, here are benchmarks when using the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack with various AMD GCN graphics cards.

• With Feral Interactive releasing Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux this morning, you are probably curious how well this Linux OpenGL game port will perform with your graphics card prior to spending $60 USD for the game. Up now are my NVIDIA GeForce benchmarks for Total War: WARHAMMER on Ubuntu Linux with nine different graphics cards. In the hours ahead will be the relevant AMD tests with this newest AAA Linux game as soon as I finish up that testing.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today, November 22, 2016, KDE announced the release of the fourth maintenance update to the long-term supported KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME Project’s Michael Catanzaro sent us an email earlier today to inform us about the general availability of the second development snapshot of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.

• As part of today’s GNOME 3.23.2 development snapshot towards the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, several core components and apps from the GNOME Stack received many improvements and new features.

• We reported earlier on the release of the GNOME 3.23.2 desktop environment, which is an early development snapshot of the upcoming major GNOME 3.24 release, and we told you that we’d be covering the most important parts of this milestone.

• Now, we’ve told you what’s new in the Epiphany 3.23.2 web browser, and, in this article, we’d like to tell you about some of the changes implemented in the GNOME Music application, which is the default music playback utility distributed as part of the GNOME Stack.

• We reported the other day that the GNOME 3.23.2 desktop is out, which is the second development snapshot towards the GNOME 3.24 release, bringing many updated components and applications.

• Earlier this month, we were among the first to report on the availability of the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, which we’ll be able to fully enjoy on the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” operating system, due for release in December 2016.

• Later, we were also the first to report on the first point release of the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, but now everything is official. “On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 3.2,” said Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, in the official release announcement.

Distributions

New Releases

• Today, November 22, 2016, Clonezilla Live and GParted Live developer Steven Shiau has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of a new stable build of his popular disk cloning and imaging live system.

• Clonezilla Live 2.5.0-5 is now the most advanced version of the open-source and free disk cloning solution based on the Clonezilla partition or disk clone tool. It’s the first release to use a kernel from the Linux 4.8 series, namely 4.8.7, and includes all the latest package versions from the Debian Sid repository as of November 22, 2016.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• For those curious how openSUSE Leap 42.2, which was released last week, compares performance-wise to Leap 42.1 and the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are some benchmarks today for your viewing pleasure. Also included with this openSUSE performance comparison was Intel’s Clear Linux distribution as an independent metric of a distribution that’s generally among the fastest thanks to the aggressive optimizations by default.

• Mentors for this year’s Google Summer of Code blog about their experience being a mentor, the Mentor Summit at Google and the collaborative effort start an openSUSE mentoring page, 101.opensuse.org. View the blow here or read it below.

• Back in 2014~2015 was talk of an Ubuntu Tablet inspired by the failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone campaign and the company would just send along prototype pictures and specifications along with some pricing goals. That tablet never materialized but now that same group of folks is trying a crowdfunding campaign for an openSUSE tablet.

• Coming as a surprise to us today is that MJ Technology, the basically unheard of company trying for the earlier Ubuntu Tablet, is now pushing out an openSUSE Tablet. “MJ Technology, a leader in affordable cutting edge tech, is pleased to introduce the MJ Technology Warrior series tablets powered by openSUSE,” MJ Tech’s CEO told OpenSUSE.org. Affordable cutting edge tech? Their only other apparent product has been a “MJ7HDTV” Android HDTV Tuner Tablet.

• It’s official; the Warrior Tablet made by MJ Technology and powered by openSUSE is ready for the world; now it just needs funding through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.

• Avid Linux users can reap the benefits of four 10.1” Linux tablets offered by MJ Techology. The specifications of the four tablets vary in power and cost, but all come with the power of Linux and openSUSE at the core.

• “MJ Technology, a leader in affordable cutting edge tech, is pleased to introduce the MJ Technology Warrior series tablets powered by openSUSE,” said Mark Jun, CEO for MJ Technology.

• Missouri-based technology firm MJ Technology has begun a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo to raise US$100,000 to build the first tablets that run GNU/Linux.

• The eight developers/engineers, who make up the firm, aim to make a tablet that runs the 64-bit version of the community Linux distribution, openSUSE.

• News of Linux releases are getting most of the headlines during November while snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed have subtly been flying under the radar.

• Other than Nov. 3 and Nov. 6, openSUSE Tumbleweed had updated software snapshots released every day this month.

• The last update on news.opensuse.org included snapshot 20161108 and the 13 snapshots that have followed that have included hundreds of new packages.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat generates $2 billion in annual revenue but, by its CEO’s own admission, that’s not nearly as much value as it gives away. In a recent interview, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst likened his company to a machine tool manufacturer in the Industrial Revolution—a company that does well, but not nearly as well as the companies that put those machine tools to use to build, for example, cars.

• And yet Red Hat—on a “mission from God” of sorts—seems perfectly happy with its role as enabler of other multi-billion-dollar enterprises.

Finance

Fedora

• The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 25, the next big step our journey into the containerized, modular future!

• Fedora is a global community that works together to lead the advancement of free and open source software. As part of the community’s mission the project delivers three editions, each one a free, Linux-based operating system tailored to meet specific use cases: Fedora 25 Atomic Host, Fedora 25 Server, and Fedora 25 Workstation.

• Fedora 25 was just officially released. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system to the latest version of Fedora. Fedora offers a command-line method for upgrading Fedora 24 to Fedora 25. The Fedora 24 Workstation also has a graphical method.

• Fedora 25 arrived on November 22, 2016, as reported right here on Softpedia, and it ships with lots of modern GNU/Linux technologies and the latest open source software releases.

• We bet that many of you would like to upgrade their Fedora 24 installations to Fedora 25, so Fedora Ambassador Justin W. Flory published a nice tutorial on how to achieve that, no matter the method used, via GNOME Software or command-line using the powerful DNF package manager.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• You’re looking at a proposed new 3D dock that, its creator hopes, will help bring Ubuntu convergence to more people.

• The device is called the ‘Station Dock’ and it’s the brainchild of Marius Gripsgård, the chief developer behind the community-based Ubports project.

• Canonical is betting that LXD, which it calls the “pure-container hypervisor,” can beat VMware, KVM and other traditional hypervisors. To see for myself, I recently gave it a whirl. Here’s what I found.

• By “pure-container hypervisor,” Canonical means it is a hypervisor that works by creating containers running on top of the host system, just like Docker. There is no hardware emulation evolved. Because LXD containers have much less overhead than traditional virtual machines, they theoretically can support many more guest operating systems than traditional hypervisors, while also delivering better performance.

Devices/Embedded

• The “RabbitMax Flex” is a RPi HAT board for IoT with an IR transceiver, relays, 5x cable slots for I2C sensors, and optional dev kits with LCDs and sensors.

• A growing number of Internet of Things add-ons are available for the Raspberry Pi SBC, including HAT add-on boards and other development kits, but most are aimed at more experienced developers. An Indiegogo project from Bulgaria called RabbitMax Flex is targeting the more casual DIY prototyper with a completely open source HAT board that doesn’t require soldering. As the name suggests, the board relies on flexi cables.

• SUSE released the first 64-bit distribution for the Raspberry Pi 3 with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Fedora and Ubuntu should be there soon.

• When we reported on the potential for 64-bit Linux distributions supporting the Raspberry Pi 3 earlier this year, the server focused SUSE Linux was not even on the radar. This week, however SUSE and the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) would be the first 64-bit distro for the quad-core, Cortex-A53 based RPi 3, supporting its ARM A64 instruction set and ARMv8-A architecture.

• Then, 6 years later, Raspberry Pi came. As any project that is bound to change the world, it began as a little initiative by Eben Upton, growing over time from the very first 50 alpha boards to over 10 million units sold.

• One year later and you can find UDOO on Kickstarter: a quad core computer and an Arduino, all in one board. Take into account that at time the alternative, in the Mini PC space, was Raspberry Pi, a single core computer. The idea of Arduino and a quad core computer in one board created an instant sensation: after all, for most projects you need both an Arduino and Raspberry Pi (and some shields) and having all this stuff in one board takes less space and just makes things easier.

• Read more

• The tiny, open source “EspoTek Labrador” board combines an oscilloscope, waveform generator, power supply, logic analyzer, and multimeter.

• We’ve seen several open source projects that have slashed the price and complexity of digital acquisition (DAQ), testing and measurement, and other lab gear, such as the Red Pitaya, which is now selling kits under the STEMlab name starting at $199. Now, Melbourne, Australia startup Espotek has gone to Crowd Supply to launch an “EspoTek Labrador” board with somewhat similar electronics lab functions for only $29, with worldwide shipments due Jan. 31, 2017.

Phones

Android

• OnePlus started its existence by hyping up the Android community to a completely irresponsible degree in advance of the release of the OnePlus One. Lucky for them the OPO was a pretty good phone. However, the breakdown of OnePlus’ relationship with Cyanogen Inc. made the OnePlus 2 a less appealing device. It was lacking in a few hardware areas and the software was very barebones. The OnePlus 3 was a clear improvement, but just a few months later OnePlus has given it the boot in favor of the OnePlus 3T.

• As the name implies, this phone is very similar to the OnePlus 3. In fact, the OnePlus 3T has the same chassis as the OP3 and shares most of the same specs. The big additions here are the Snapdragon 821 (up from 820) and 3400mAh battery (previously 3000mAh). With the spec bump also comes a price bump—the OnePlus 3T starts at $440 instead of $400. I don’t know that the additions are going to change the experience, but the OnePlus 3T is still a good deal. OnePlus knows its niche.

• The Tor Project recently announced the release of its prototype for a Tor-enabled smartphone—an Android phone beefed up with privacy and security in mind, and intended as equal parts opsec kung fu and a gauntlet to Google.

• The new phone, designed by Tor developer Mike Perry, is based on Copperhead OS, the hardened Android distribution profiled first by Ars earlier this year.

• We’ve seen all sorts of Android smartphones released over the years, from the ones that ship with Google’s stock Android or a third-party skin, to the ones that sport two displays, are curved or have heavy security features. There are tons of different smartphones available out there, and a number of different OS’ available for those smartphones, and that’s the true beauty of Android. Now, some of you have probably heard of a Tor-enabled smartphone by Tor Project. This smartphone put a huge emphasis on security and privacy, and those of you who are very concerned about such issues should be interested, though do keep in mind that the Tor-enabled smartphone actually references software that can be installed on a smartphone, not the actual hardware smartphone that will be available for sale, just to make that clear.

• Newer Apple smartphones and tablets are less reliable than their Android counterparts, according to a recent report by mobile diagnostics firm Blancco Technology Group. Blancco’s Q3 ‘State of Mobile Device Performance Health Report’ suggests that iPhone and iPad devices are twice as prone to crash, with a 62 per cent failure rate compared to Android devices at 47 per cent.

• Blancco’s report attributed the failure of iOS devices driven by the bugs that were introduced with the iOS 10 update. Apple iPhone 6 was the worst hit device with a 13 per cent failure rate, followed by the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6S at 9 per cent; and the iPad Air 2 at 2 per cent.

• Very few, if any, OEMS do budget flagships better than OnePlus, and the new 3T continues the company’s trend of offering a lot of powerful hardware for not a lot of money. Ryan recently reviewed the 3T and found it to be a small improvement over the 3, which was already a fantastic phone. Now, if you live in North America, you can order one of your very own.

Free Software/Open Source

• So, you want to share your thoughts on social media, but you’re tired of the way apps like Facebook and Twitter monopolize your posts and feed. It might be time to try an entirely new alternative: Mastodon.

• Mastodon bills itself as a free, open-source social media server. Like Twitter, it’s a microblogging platform. Unlike Twitter, it’s non-commercial and not centrally owned, so you don’t have to worry about what will happen to your account or your posts if it gets acquired by another company.

• CSS frameworks are among the most actively used tools in web design and development. If you’ve been involved in the industry, at some point you would have heard, seen or used a CSS framework or library before. What many developers do not realise is that these frameworks flourish thanks to the open source movement.

• Frameworks like Bootstrap and ZURB’s Foundation offer a platform for rapid prototyping, getting your site up and running by providing all of the common building blocks. Bootstrap and Foundation are just two popular examples, there are hundreds if not thousands of great frameworks out there that aim to make your job easier and speed up your development work.

• Open source is the antithesis of proprietary software. It’s the free lovin’ hippie amid a sea of corporate profiteers. Defined as software for which the source code is freely available to view, modify, and redistribute, open source software has benefited hardened coders and layman consumers alike. But just because it’s free doesn’t mean profit-driven companies can’t use open source to their advantage.

• Open Source is much more than making something available to the public. It is not only about your code, it is also about licenses, understanding participation and herding cats a.k.a. dealing with community issues. In this article we will briefly look at the benefits of open sourcing your code and the pitfalls to avoid.

• While most people associate Disney with Mickey Mouse, animation, and amusement parks, the company is forging a path in the open source software realm, encouraging contributions from its developers and releasing software of its own.

• Not surprising, several projects involve images, such as the OpenEXR high-dynamic-range image file format developed by Disney subsidiary Industrial Light and Magic. Others are less image-focused, including Munki, a set of tools to help MacOS X admins manage software installs and removals.

• Thus far, we’ve discussed the importance of setting goals to guide the metrics process, avoiding vanity metrics, and outlined the general types of metrics that are useful for studying your community. With a solid set of goals in place, we are now ready to discuss some of the technical details of gathering and analyzing your community metrics that align with those goals.

• The tools you use and the way in which you collect metrics depend heavily on the processes you have in place for your community. Think about all of the ways in which your community members interact with each other and where collaboration happens. Where is code being committed? Where are discussions happening? More importantly than the where, what is the how? Do you have documented processes for community members to contribute? If you have a solid understanding of what your community is doing and how it is doing it, you’ll be much more successful at extracting meaningful data to support your goals.

• Nowadays, open source efforts are going on not only at big technology companies, but at big companies that leverage technology. Two prime examples exist in the entertaintment industry: Both Netflix and Disney have robust open source programs and have contributed mighty tools to the community. Here is a peek at what they have contributed.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• If you’ve used incognito browsing features, or even the Tor anonymity tool, you’re already familiar with the concept of avoiding online trackers. Now, Mozilla has launched a browser for iOS users that offers security features that block unwanted trackers.

SaaS/Back End

CMS

• In case you missed it, open source content management systems (CMS) have come of age. With free CMS tools, you can manage a blog, manage content in the cloud and much more You’re probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue.

• The good news is that free, sophisticated guides for evaluating CMS systems have flourished, as well. We’ve covered many of the best guides for getting going with a good CMS system. Here, in this newly updated post, you’ll find several additional, good resources.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• “I am really disappointed that The Linux Foundation accepted Microsoft as a member in the Linux ecosystem, especially considering its own mission to promote, protect and advance Linux,” added another. Rather than expanding its membership to include established commercial vendors, the contributor said the group should be focused on “standardization, stable programming API’s, more use of inherent safe programming languages and less fragmentation of developer effort.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• The State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, is working on a law to reduce government dependence on IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. According to Bloomberg, Russian government agencies will be restricted in buying proprietary software, and will have to prefer open source software instead.

• This step further pushes proprietary vendors out of Russia. Russian companies are increasingly buying software from domestic providers like Diasoft and New Cloud technologies, or deploying open source packages like PostgreSQL and Linux, instead of purchasing licensed packages from companies like Oracle, Autodesk and Siemens.

• Whatever the motivations, the end result will be the same, a ramping up of utilization of FLOSS in Russia, a good thing. It’s too bad Russia did not make these moves a decade or longer ago which would have caused the move to be completed by now. Too bad Putin isn’t as reasonable in his other dealings with the West.

Licensing/Legal

• The open-source community behind the MIPS processor is working with the US regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the area of software controlled radio technology for IoT.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• It is human nature to want to share the enthusiasm you have for a subject or project with others. Wikipedia is a great place for that, where you can record your expertise and create a fact-based touchpoint for your interest. The site’s mission is altruistic, and it has been my experience that Wikipedia administrators zealously guard against content that has an obvious agenda, is not relevant to today’s Zeitgeist, or does not provide the references and citations needed to prove accuracy.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Open Source software has been around for decades. Over these decades, Open Source software has been the driving force behind most of the Internet, and all of the top-500 supercomputers. The product of the Open Source software movement is perhaps more important than Gutenberg’s press. But hardware has not yet fully embraced this super-charging effect of openness. Being able to simply buy an open source CPU, free of all proprietary bits and NDAs is impossible.

• Four years ago, Alicia Gibb was trying to unite a fragmented open-source hardware community to join together to create innovative products.

• So was born the Open Source Hardware Association, which Gibb hoped would foster a community of hardware “hackers” sharing, tweaking, and updating hardware designs. It shared the ethics and ethos of open-source software and encouraged the release of hardware designs — be it for it processors, machines, or devices — for public reuse.

• Since then, OSHWA has gained strength, with Intel, Raspberry Pi, and Sparkfun endorsing the organization. Its growth has coincided with the skyrocketing popularity of Arduino and Raspberry Pi-like developer boards — many of them open source — to create gadgets and IoT devices.

Programming/Development

• We are excited to announce the v0.6 release of Pyston, our high performance Python JIT.

• In this release our main goal was to reduce the overall memory footprint. It also contains a lot of additional smaller changes for improving compatibility and fixing bugs.

• For those interested in greater Python performance, the Dropbox team responsible for the Pyston project that’s interpreting Python using JIT techniques with LLVM, has announced a new release.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today issued a message praising the “milestone” report of a High-Level Panel on access to medicines he set up a year ago to address the continuing problem of medicines prices being too high for many in the world to afford, and the lack of access to quality medicines for many. In his message, he called on governments to review the report and its recommendations, and to chart a way forward to address the problem of lack of access to medicines and health technologies.

• Candidates from around the world vying to be the next director general of the World Health Organization in recent weeks have presented their views to member states on a range of public health issues. Two of the six candidates answered a question put to them by Intellectual Property Watch relating to medicines prices, innovation and intellectual property. Here are their answers.

• The question by IP-Watch to candidates was: For a long time, WHO has worked without success on addressing alternative models of financing for R&D and more affordability/accessibility of medicines for poor populations. Recently, the issue has become a mainstream concern with high prices in developed countries too, while questions of incentivizing innovation come into play. What would be your vision of how to address this problem?

• The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations today announced that its Director General is stepping down, but will stay at the helm of the organisation until the end of January.

Security

• Recently released exploit code makes people running fully patched versions of Fedora and other Linux distributions vulnerable to drive-by attacks that can install keyloggers, backdoors, and other types of malware, a security researcher says.

• If you’re a Linux administrator, then you’re likely aware that even being fully up to date on all of the patches for your Linux distribution of choice is no guarantee that you’re free from vulnerabilities. Linux is made up of numerous components, any of which can open up an installation to one exploit or another.

Defence/Aggression

• Over the past two days, President-elect Donald Trump has put together a national security team that will move US foreign policy far to the right. The most shocking appointment, announced Thursday, was retired Army General Michael Flynn, a fanatical opponent of radical Islam, as his national security adviser. On Friday, Trump named Kansas GOP Representative Mike Pompeo to run the CIA. Pompeo is a member of the House Intelligence Committee who strongly opposed the Iran nuclear deal as well as the post-Snowden “reforms” of US intelligence.

• But so far, little attention has been paid to a retired Army lieutenant general, Joseph “Keith” Kellogg, one of Trump’s closest military and foreign-policy advisers. Kellogg is a former contracting executive who is considered a front-runner for a senior position at the Pentagon. He has been among the small group of advisers seen entering and leaving Trump Tower this week.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• So, you think Assange is a prick? Well tough shit. History-making rebels aren’t meant to be sweethearts.

• What, the world’s most ardent defenders of freedom want to know, has happened to Julian Assange? Just a few years ago, he was such an earnest fellow, who spoke all truth to power. Well-known liberals gave him airtime, centrist trade organisations gave him membership and middle-brow humourists gave him plaudits and harbour. Now, all that the honourable can offer him is their disgust. He’s a Russian collaborator, a spiteful traitor, a pussy-grabbing narcissist whose leaks on Clinton place him in precisely the same deplorable basket that emits the stink of Trump.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Forest managers have never seen anything like it. Across California, an astounding 102 million trees have died over the past six years from drought and disease — including 62 million trees in 2016 alone, the US Forest Service estimates. Once-mighty oaks and pines have faded into ghastly hues of brown and gray.

• The biggest worry is that these dead, dry forests will become highly combustible when California’s annual fire season rolls around next summer. The south and central Sierra Nevada regions, where most of the dead trees are located, are at particular risk of severe wildfires…

Finance

• Support for the EU has risen across Europe, including in the UK, since the British people voted to leave.

• Pro-EU sentiment has grown in five of the six largest member states, according to a survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation. These were the UK, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. The only large state to see a fall in support for the EU was Spain.

• “The looming Brexit seems to have been the best advertisement for the EU,” said Aart De Geus, of the Bertelsmann Foundation, Germany’s largest NGO.

• In the UK referendum on 23 June, the country narrowly voted to leave the EU, with 52% voting leave while 48% supported remain.

• But the Bertelsmann survey, completed in August against a backdrop of confusion about the British government’s Brexit strategy, showed that 56% of British citizens wanted to stay in the EU, compared with 49% when a similar survey was conducted in March.

• With relations between the EU and Turkey already deeply strained, a broad coalition of members of the European Parliament Tuesday called for ending EU membership talks with Ankara as punishment for a trampling of democratic freedoms and human rights by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan following a failed coup attempt last July.

• The fraying of ties comes at a particularly sensitive time for Brussels, with the EU relying on Turkey to keep up its end of an agreement on the return of migrants who have sought refuge in Europe.

• While an unraveling of that deal could create acute political problems in capitals across the Continent, many members of Parliament called for ending the arrangement, saying Erdoğan was using it as a tool of “blackmail.” Leaders of the biggest factions in the Parliament also called for ending the discussions with Turkey about EU membership.

• I have recently reported in The Indicter and Global Research on the payment done by the Swedish giant corporation Ericsson to the Clinton foundation, and also on the intervention of the company in Haiti – which resulted in disastrous consequences for the Haiti economy, as reported in a cable from the US Embassy in Port Au Prince to the State Department.

• New exposures referring unethical transactions of the Swedish company, indicates that Ericsson would have even bribed the then Costa Rica’s President Miguel Angel Rodriguez while competing for a major telecom contract.

• The exposures are partly based on a testimony by a former employee at the company, Liss Olof Nenzell, which was in charge of “sensitive payments”. The report adds that also ministers in the government as well as executives of the Telecom companies have received the Ericsson’s payments. Reports regarding the exact sum allegedly sent by Ericsson to Miguel Angel Rodriguez vaies in the Swedish media. While the graphic in Swedish Radio names $750,000, The Local (Carl Bildt’s megaphone) reduced it to $271,245.

• Former Costa Rica’s president Rodriguez was staunch supporter of the UN invasion in Haiti. Later, Ericsson obtained extended credits in Haiti, which according to a document declassified by the US State Department would have caused a deterioration in the economy of Haiti.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• President-elect Donald Trump won’t subject Hillary Clinton to a criminal inquiry — instead, he’ll help her heal, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.

• “I think when the president-elect who’s also the head of your party … tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members,” Kellyanne Conway told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who first reported that the president-elect would not pursue his campaign pledge to “lock up” Clinton, his Democratic opponent.

• “Look, I think, he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them,” Conway, who is now on the Trump transition team, said in her interview.

• President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tempered some of his most extreme campaign promises, dropping his vow to jail Hillary Clinton, expressing doubt about the value of torturing terrorism suspects and pledging to have an open mind about climate change.

• But in a wide-ranging, hourlong interview with reporters and editors at The New York Times — which was scheduled, canceled and then reinstated after a dispute over the ground rules — Mr. Trump was fiercely unapologetic about repeatedly flouting the traditional ethical and political conventions that have long shaped the American presidency.

• This is a powerful moment in U.S. history. Disappointment in Donald Trump’s victory has brought thousands of people onto the streets, chanting “Not my president!” Trump and Clinton were not the only people who ran for president; the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson, the Green Party’s Jill Stein and 27 other people were also on the ballot. Johnson won 3.3% of the vote, while Stein took 1% (1.3 million votes). Neither Johnson nor Stein made as great an impact as the polls suggested or as they had hoped. If they had attained the 5% threshold, their parties would qualify for public campaign funding.

• As the results of the election began to sink in, I spoke to Jill Stein about the election and about what might come from a Trump presidency.

• New York Times reporter David Sanger worked extensively with former deputy CIA director Michael Morell during the reporting of his book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power—even arranging to provide Morell with access to an entire unpublished chapter for his review—according to documents obtained by Gizmodo.

• Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book — its ranking soared on Amazon and by day’s end it was no longer available. (Harvard University Press is reprinting the book for the first time since 2010, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.)

• Young doesn’t necessarily equal web savvy, at least according to a recent Stanford study. More than 80 percent of students were unable to tell an advertisement — labeled as sponsored content — from a news story.

• The study attempted to judge news literacy among students and examine how they might respond and evaluate to stories gathered from Facebook and Twitter feeds, photographs, reader comments on news sites, and blog posts. All told, researchers collected some 7,804 responses from students in 12 US states.

• Almost $600,000 per hour.

• That’s the fee Donald Trump’s charity got for recording a video on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch.

• It’s a payment that could be in violation of tax laws, legal experts told The Daily Beast. When Hillary Clinton’s foundation received money from the very same billionaire, Donald Trump blasted her as “crooked.”

• Ukrainian steel magnate Victor Pinchuk’s foundation was the single largest outside donor to Donald Trump’s private charity in 2015, according to new IRS filings filed by the organization. The $150,000 gift amounted to 20 percent of the foundation’s total donations during that time, the documents showed. The filings also affirmed Trump violated tax laws by using his private foundation to self-deal, or enrich himself and his businesses instead of fulfilling a charitable mission.

• Pinchuk’s gift was given in conjunction with a short video Trump made for the Yalta European Strategy annual meeting, held in Kiev in September of 2015, according to The Washington Post.

• A Ukrainian steel magnate who was one of the largest donors to the Clinton Foundation has surfaced on newly filed tax records for Donald Trump’s charitable foundation, raising alarms from some of the Clinton’s most vocal critics.

• “I think is troubling,” said Peter Schweizer, author of the book Clinton Cash, which documented the blending of the Clinton’s charitable and political interests. “He’s somebody that donated to the Clinton Foundation, and this is a problem…I think there’s no other way to read it other than they are hoping to get some favor in return.”

• Pinchuk’s $150,000 donation, first reported by The Washington Post, was to the Trumps’ family-run charity, far smaller and more intimate than the vast Clinton Foundation. In total, the Trump non profit took in $780,000 in contributions last year.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump—the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory—should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.

• First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News reporter Katy Tur’s coverage of him to a photograph the news network has used that shows him with a double chin. Why didn’t they use “nicer” pictures?

• For more than twenty minutes, Trump railed about “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. When he was asked about the sort of “fake news” that now clogs social media, Trump replied that it was the networks that were guilty of spreading fake news. The “worst,” he said, were CNN (“liars!”) and NBC.

• This is where we are. The President-elect does not care who knows how unforgiving or vain or distracted he is. This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years.

• The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign.”

• Christians in Ireland feel unable to express their opinions on same-sex marriage, the CEO of free speech group Index on Censorship has said.

• Jodie Ginsberg, speaking in a debate on religious freedom, emphasised the need for tolerance of those with non-mainstream views, and their freedom to express those views.

• Web users in the UK will be banned from accessing websites portraying a range of non-conventional sexual acts, under a little discussed clause to a government bill currently going through parliament.

• The proposal, part of the digital economy bill, would force internet service providers to block sites hosting content that would not be certified for commercial DVD sale by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).

• It is contained within provisions of the bill designed to enforce strict age verification checks to stop children accessing adult websites. After pressure from MPs, the culture secretary, Caroline Bradley, announced on Saturday that the government would amend the bill to include powers to block non-compliant websites.

• In order to comply with the censorship rules, many mainstream adult websites would have to render whole sections inaccessible to UK audiences. That is despite the acts shown being legal for consenting over-16s to perform and for adults in almost all other liberal countries to film, distribute and watch.

• Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has cultivated relationships with China’s leaders, including President Xi Jinping. He has paid multiple visits to the country to meet its top internet executives. He has made an effort to learn Mandarin.

• Inside Facebook, the work to enter China runs far deeper.

• The social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, according to three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity because the tool is confidential. The feature was created to help Facebook get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked, these people said. Mr. Zuckerberg has supported and defended the effort, the people added.

Privacy/Surveillance

• On January 20, President Obama will hand Donald Trump the keys to the surveillance state. Not only will Trump have the NSA’s incredibly powerful technological tools at his disposal, but he’ll also have the benefit of the overbroad and unconstitutional surveillance authorities embraced by the Obama administration — authorities that give tremendous discretion to executive branch officials.

• These spying powers have long been cause for concern because they violate our core rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. But when wielded by a man who invited Russia to hack his political opponent, who reportedly eavesdropped on his own hotel guests, and who has called for expanded surveillance of Americans and especially American Muslims, they are all the more frightening. Fortunately, there are several ways to fight back against the surveillance state, including concrete steps you can take to protect yourself and your communications.

• The legislation in question is called the Investigatory Powers Bill. It’s been cleared by politicians and awaits only the formality of royal assent before it becomes law. The bill will legalize the UK’s global surveillance program, which scoops up communications data from around the world, but it will also introduce new domestic powers, including a government database that stores the web history of every citizen in the country. UK spies will be empowered to hack individuals, internet infrastructure, and even whole towns — if the government deems it necessary.

• The Washington Post reported on 19 November that Defence Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper Jr made the recommendations to President Obama, now serving out the final days of his term.

• Clapper and Carter, Rogers’ two bosses, reportedly have problems with Rogers’ performance in the role. There have have apparently been “persistent complaints from NSA personnel that Rogers is aloof, frequently absent and does not listen to staff input”. His tenure as NSA director has been marked by several significant security breaches. The most recent example was the arrest of NSA contractor Harold T. Martin III, whose garage was found filled with terabytes of classified data on removable storage devices.

• There is a global siege on privacy. Governments all over the world have introduced legislation (sometimes secret) which forces email, internet or data storage providers to track what you do and make that data available to their governments. This, of course, also means third parties who gain access to the storage systems can see and abuse it. And because so many of us have put so much of our data at just a few providers, we’re at great risk as events like last week’s shutdown of hundreds of Google accounts did show.

• While Google, Dropbox and others lure customers in with ‘free’ data storage and great online services, governments benefit from centralized data storages as it makes it easy for them to hack in or demand data from these companies.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Albuquerque Police Department is coming under fire after former records supervisor, Reynaldo Chavez, gave a sworn affidavit claiming officers altered and deleted body camera videos.

• According to New Mexico In Depth, after at least two police shootings, videos were deleted or edited so they didn’t show the incident.

• In the case of 19-year-old suspected car thief Mary Hawkes in April 2014, the videos were partially deleted in spots or altered. In a separate incident, surveillance camera video from a nearby salon showed APD officers shooting law enforcement informant, Jeremy Robertson. That video too was altered. Chavez explained the June 2014 video had “the tell-tale signs that it has been altered and images that had been captured are now deleted. One of the deleted images captured the officers shooting Jeremy Robertson.”

• Thirty-one authors have signed an open letter to President Obama, urging him to pardon Edward Snowden, the former U.S. government contractor charged with violating the Espionage Act for leaking National Security Agency documents to journalists.

• Writers who signed the letter include Michael Chabon, Ursula K. LeGuin, Cheryl Strayed, Neil Gaiman, Teju Cole and Joyce Carol Oates.

• “Throughout American history, the pardonable offense and the pardon privilege itself have functioned together as a uniquely direct system of check-and-balance between the individual citizen and the executive branch,” the letter reads. “Both can be understood as extreme actions undertaken to mitigate the harm caused by judicial and legislative insufficiency; by courts that would rule unfairly, and by laws — like the Espionage Act — whose vagaries and datedness would make their application too severe or too broad.”

• President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday expressed reservations about the use of torture. But he did not disavow the practice, or his promise to bring it back. And if he does, C.I.A. doctors may be America’s last defense against a return to savagery. But they’ll need to break sharply with what they did the last time around.

• Buried in a trove of documents released last summer is the revelation that C.I.A. physicians played a central role in designing the agency’s post-Sept. 11 torture program. The documents, declassified in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, show in chilling detail how C.I.A. medicine lost its moral moorings. It’s long been known that doctors attended torture as monitors. What’s new is their role as its engineers.

• The documents include previously redacted language from a directive by the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services telling physicians at clandestine interrogation sites to flout medical ethics by lying to detainees and collaborating in abuse. This language also reveals that doctors helped to design a waterboarding method more brutal than what even lawyers for the George W. Bush administration allowed.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Trump this week formally selected two staunch opponents of net neutrality to oversee the incoming President’s FCC transition team. Economist Jeff Eisenach and former Sprint Corp lobbyist Mark Jamison both have deep-rooted ties to the broadband sector, and both played major roles in helping the industry fight passage of the U.S.’s net neutrality rules last year. We had already noted that incumbent ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have been getting excited by the possibility of a hamstrung FCC and the roll back of numerous consumer-friendly policies made under the tenure of outgoing FCC boss Tom Wheeler.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• You don’t often see the FBI’s website targeted by a DMCA takedown notice, but when you do, you can be sure there’s someone with a criminal record behind it. The last time we saw this happening, it was convicted fraudster Sean Gjerde, who thought he could perform his own reputation management by copy-pasting the FBI’s press release onto his own website as part of a “book” he was “writing,” and then begin issuing bogus takedown notices targeting content he didn’t create. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for all the reasons he was NEVER GOING TO GET AWAY WITH IT.

• Enter Anthony Lewis Jerdine, someone with a bit of reputation to clean up. Over the past decade, Jerdine has been imprisoned for bank fraud, made the US Marshals fugitive list, been sanctioned for unauthorized practice of law, been called a vexatious litigant by the Ohio court system, and, lest we forget, formed a trust in his own name.

Copyrights

• When visual artists sell their work, they usually perceive a price for that work. If it is resold at a much higher price, some countries provide for a resale right, providing artists with resale royalties. In other countries, such a right does not exist, putting visual artists in a disadvantageous situation, particularly indigenous artists, whose work can become very valuable on the international art markets.

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